The other day I caught Bella sitting by herself in the corner talking with her stuffed animal doggie. The conversation was no more than gibberish words like, “abba-bishi-yaka-yaka” interspersed with clearly pronounced words of meaning like, “up, please, mamma, dog, out”. Apparently, she was rehearsing her conversational skills by using all the words she knew and filling the gaps with gibberish to create a form of language that only Mr. Doggie and Mommy could understand.
Children her age learn language first as single-words and then progress to two-word sentences when they understand that more words put together have more meaning. Until recently, Bella has only been able to speak single-words at a time. But yesterday as we were driving home in the car feeding her French fries (her absolutely favorite food for the moment), Jin instructed her to say thank you to mommy for the fries. Bella surprised us both by saying slowly and deliberately, as clear as day, “Thank you, Mommy.” Wow! Even though Jin was driving, we both exploded in applause and congratulated her for her 3-word accomplishment. We were so thrilled with her achievement that I decided to give her the whole bag of fries to feed herself. A few minutes later I heard from the backseat a long, drawn out, “Uhhh, Ohhh”, but I was too enraptured with my Burger King Original Chicken sandwich and my own fries to turn around to see what happened. Later, Bella crumpled up the paper French fry bag and handed it to me. She finished the entire bag in less than 5 minutes! Or so we thought.
When we got home, we pulled Bella from the car in the dark and put her to sleep. Then I went to clean out the car only to find the back seat littered with little French fries! From the looks of the scattered mess, she probably swallowed less than 5 fries. I can only guess that Bella accidentally spilled the fries everywhere and then tried to let us know by saying, uh oh. I guess mommy and daddy have to practice Bella-nese more!
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